


a toast to the red queen

by screechfox



Category: The Yogscast
Genre: Canon Compliant, Character Development, Character Study, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-03
Updated: 2016-07-03
Packaged: 2018-07-19 19:17:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,179
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7374133
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/screechfox/pseuds/screechfox
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>the first time rythian lands in her mushroom village, she pushes past him with arms full of gears and tells him that she can’t chat - she’s busy. he stands there, bewildered, as she tinkers, fully focused, and it takes her glancing up and shooing him away for him to leave.</p><p>--</p><p>A study of Zoeya, and how she changes and grows.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a toast to the red queen

**Author's Note:**

> title shamelessly taken from 'red queen' by area 11. all quotes are from the blackrock chronicles except for the first, which is from duncan's tekkit series, and the second to last one, which is from panda's yogcraft.

the first time rythian lands in her mushroom village, she pushes past him with arms full of gears and tells him that she can’t chat - she’s busy. he stands there, bewildered, as she tinkers, fully focused, and it takes her glancing up and shooing him away for him to leave.

the second time, it’s on invitation. she feels a little bad for brushing him off so abruptly, and would like to apologise. also, she heard you’re a mage, how interesting. those condensers she’s heard so much about sound so useful!

the third time, he’s prepared the schematics for a condenser. she gives him a peck on the cheek and proceeds to get back to farming. there’s work to be done - it’s not easy to be a one-woman engineer/farmer/builder.

there is no fourth time, not until she lands in the lake and drags herself out, soaking wet. her old golden blonde hair is a copper red. in the brief gap between worlds, she’d decided that she’d wanted a change.

 

_ “Got my energy condenser there… Which I’m sure Rythian’s told you about.” _

 

she drags herself out, coughing and spluttering. her heart beats fast, and rythian’s looking at her like she’s a cross between a ghost and an angel.

well, okay. her entire life has been destroyed, from her village to her machines, aside from one weensy little mushroom tucked into her pocket. but when rythian explains the situation - as he sees it - she just nods, over-the-top serious.

rythian’s nice enough. she can work this to her advantage.

what? she’s mad about all her stuff being destroyed too.

 

_ “I’m in. Yes. Will there be money?” .... “Will there be food?” _

 

for a while, it’s a lot of piggy-backing alongside rythian’s magic stuff.

he tells her about the condenser like he’s forgotten she knows already, and she doesn’t bother to correct him. he murmurs about transmutation and philosopher’s stones, and she pricks up her ears when she hears something interesting.

zoeya is used to working with machinery and plants, and magic follows neither of their rules. or, rather, it follows both of their rules, against everything she’s ever learnt.

it blooms like golden petals ready to be plucked from their flower, but the energy, the calculations, are all so mechanical, and she…

she does not get it.

and then she slips the cool iron band onto her finger, and flies until it’s hard to breath, and thinks that maybe it doesn’t really matter.

 

_ “There’s a skeleton behind you. I turned him into a creeper.” _

 

zoeya can admit that she forgot about teep for a while. the time with rythian had sort of pushed the people from the old world (who weren’t sjin and lalna, that is) to the back of her mind.

it pretty much jogs her memory when she’s shot, though. 

(indeed, with the new scarring on her shoulder, she’d never be able to forget,)

they search for him, and it’s really not that hard, and she thinks that maybe he  _ wanted _ to be found.

really, teep’s quite sweet, in all honesty, and after seeing the rough cave he’s been living in, she silently resolves to forgive him for the shooting.

if only he could speak - she’d ask him why.

 

_ “Good old Tee, who I completely know who that is.” _

 

somewhere along the way, the three of them fall into the rhythms of something more like friendship.

she’s still biting sometimes, still taking advantage of rythian’s good nature, but rythian treats her like she’s a mad girl and teep has a tendency to brandish his bow at the slightest provocation.

so they’re even, really.

they’re an odd little trio - an intensely focused mage, a vicious and quixotic farmer, and a dinosaur - but it works, and they start coming out of their fights and adventures unscathed.

it’s odd, to feel like someone’s got her back. odd, but good.

 

_ “Yeah, I didn’t mean shower me with meat, jeeze.” _

 

rythian goes away for a few days to do-- something.

she doesn’t really question it, because it gives her the chance to flex her interior design muscles in a way that she was never really able to do in her mushroom village.

orange glasses give everything the hue of sunset, or of fire, and zoeya finds she likes them, so she keeps them as she builds - every inch of the castle embellished with her own touch.

rythian, predictably, is bewildered. but he’s also appreciative, so it doesn’t sting too much.

besides, his time away also left her space to work on... well. other projects.

(the circuitry sings in her hands, and for the first time since the world burnt around her, she feels really and truly at home.)

 

_ “This is the living quarters. Except it’s a full room and not a quarter.” _

 

so. maybe she lays on the coronation thing a little thick.

her heart pangs with an off-key note as both rythian and nilesy leave with fear in their eyes. it just meant  _ so much _ to her.

she doesn’t know why she bothered. she knew that rythian thought the mushroom thing was her mind playing tricks, she knew that even nilesy only put up with so much oddness before he left without a trace.

she just wanted to show them something beautiful.

but this is zoeya. so she just grins and bears it. voice quiet and melancholy and monotone for a moment, until she manages to smile.

the pool is lovely.

 

_ “Hey. Bow to him. Bow to him!” _

 

the computer screens are her eyes and ears, flooding her with information from across the world.

weaknesses and threats, everything is weaknesses and threats, coded that way down to the baseline. notes and plans, weaknesses and threats.

rythian, threat level: extreme.

rythian’s light shines purple on them both as his eyes go wide in fear. in anger. in disappointment. zoeya frantically tries to justify herself, but as he goes quiet and cold and furious, she knows the truth.

she knows she has to leave.

before something goes really, truly wrong.

 

_ “I do have to pre-face this with a warning. What you see cannot be unseen. You have to… You have to trust me that I am doing this for the good of us.” _

 

teep is a good friend. more than that, zoeya knows that he’ll be useful if something goes wrong. which it almost certainly will.

when the entire point of the mission was to save the dinosaur and get him back to blackrock, she can’t help but feel a little guilty about stealing him away with the mushrooms.

circumstances have changed.

no matter how her heart aches, in the end…

she says the right words. he jumps down into the cave with her, delving away from the starlight.

 

_ “If you come with me, we’ll go on a magical adventure together, or you can go back to Rythian, and be kind of boring, I dunno.” _

 

_ … _

_ “Zoey? Have you… left? … I guess I’m alone again.” _

_ … _

 

she fights with the mushroom leaders, feels herself getting angrier and angrier, until it sets on fire around her. it should burn, she knows it should, but as it crackles in her ears for a split second, she mostly just feels empty.

zoeya gets sheepish and soft instead. around the rebel leaders, around civilians. around teep.

maybe it will help to do what people want for once.

 

_ “And, uh, they just want you to take care of them. Uh, if that’s okay.” _

 

and then tee gets a seat on the rebel council.

and then they have to do a grunt mission.

and then they find the dungeon and then teep breaks the minecraft.

she doesn’t get angry.

she just pushes it down until it's gone, until she’s useful again. (as if she ever was.)

some might call it penance, some might say she’s beating herself up about it. zoeya just thinks she’s getting what she deserves.

 

_ “You’re the best dinosaur in the world, I’m sorry for getting angry at you.” _

 

it’s… pretty shabby, really - the computer hidden away behind a secret door, because she just _ can’t stop hiding things. _

it doesn’t connect, of course. why would it? rythian probably hates her forever right now, why would he turn her computers back on?

she misses him.

zoeya regrets a lot

but she tries not to think about it. she just writes it all out on the screen like the flashing white text will magically give her the answers.

but it won’t. she has to supply all the answers. and, right now, it’s looking pretty grim.

 

_ “I mean, I  _ **_do_ ** _ need Rythian, but like--” _

  
maybe she does have a few of the answers after all.

zoeya had forgotten how lalna really was. he’s very different when she’s not looking though rythian’s lens.

brilliant, clever, mildly chaotic, but also bumbling in a way that makes him easy to manipulate. he gives her information and cool new toys more readily than rythian ever had.

it’s pretty cute, to be honest. 

 

_ “I don’t think Lalna actually realised how much weapons and knowledge we now have. … We are going to become the most powerful people on the server.” _

 

it is distinctly less cute when she sees him and rythian.

lalna, trapping rythian.

he sounds so cold, and even his laughter is callous. she can imagine the roundness of his face pared down to sharp angles in the blue light of the force field.

she feels so cold.

and so suddenly, bitterly, angry. (but she doesn’t reveal herself. not yet, at least.)

 

_ “Did-- Did he just-- He put a nuke-- Tee!” _

 

after that, it’s a bit of a blur.

zoeya knows that she has to go home. and she  _ hopes _ that maybe things aren’t as dire as they seem. with rythian, with teep, with blackrock itself.

for the first time, she is no longer her own first priority. 

it doesn’t feel like a major victory.

not even when she finally talks to him.

 

_ “Huh. I guess that message wasn’t important. Oh well.” _

 

teep’s betrayal hurts, but for a moment all zoeya can think is that this is what rythian must have felt like. so alone all of a sudden, no one but yourself for company.

she’d like to think that she was less painfully stoic than this. and also that she wasn’t pointing a gun at rythian’s back.

it’s the second time now she’s wanted to ask teep why he did what he did.

but mostly, she just wants to cry.

 

_ “Look at me, this is what you’ve reduced me to. I’m-- I’m nothing, and you’re just not saying a word.” _

 

she sings with her fellow prisoners, and it helps a bit. her throat feels red-raw by the time she’s finished, but she’s out of breath and her heart is pumping and that was actually kind of cathartic.

laughter and joking bubbles out of her, despite herself, and then she looks out of the iron bars and sees teep. teep and his tnt. she makes another quip, and she’s smiling as wide as the sun - feeling like she’s about to burst.

her good mood lasts right up until there’s no time to save her band. until there’s no way to save gilbert. until she finds a castle (and a laboratory) in ruins.

the open air still feels unfamiliar on her skin.

rythian is happy, in his way, to see her, and he took care of the mooshrooms. so she’s pretty sure she’ll feel okay soon. if slightly hysterical for the moment.

 

_ “I mean-- You obviously missed my interior decorating skills here.” _

 

rythian doesn’t ask straight away, and, honestly, zoeya is pretty grateful. 

she thinks it might be a sort of considerateness on his part. then again, it’s rythian, he might just be being bad at feelings. which is alright too.

what he  _ does _ do is offer to help her with the laser gun. which is surprising, to say the least. she tries to be considerate as well - she knows he doesn’t like the machinery, the sparking electricity - but he tells her not to worry.

she wonders what happened to change his mind.

she doesn’t talk. she avoids the question when he finally asks.

 

_ “You don’t wanna help me. I know you don’t want to help me.” _

 

even when she leads him into the prison to find her band, zoeya knows that rythian doesn’t  _ really _ believe her.

it’s starting to bother her more than it used to.

he thinks it’s bizarre, even as he begins to entertain thoughts that the mushroom thing might be real. her fault for letting a criminal, violent sheep into her band, she guesses.

at least he’s humouring her now. that’s… something.

 

_ “Basically, I betrayed the rebel leader - I broke my promise to him and he put me in jail.” _

 

for a while, it all blurs into one long mess of working on the nukes.

rythian disappears for her blaze rods, and doesn’t come back for days. she knows he can handle himself, but still, she throws herself into her work just to distract herself.

she makes herself a snazzy green visor, though, so it’s worth it. it’s way more useful than her old glasses, even if the venomous tint is rather less appealing at times.

there’s no progress on the nukes thing, not really - not without the crucial blaze rods that she’s starting to think might not be so crucial anymore

oh well. they’ll get there.

 

_ “Kind of a big nuke under our base, nbd, no big deal. Kinda hoping you’d have a bit more, y’know, haste.” _

 

they don’t get there.

they don’t get there at all, even with blaze rods, ender pearls, two scotsmen, and a pub full of chickens. (not that she’d been expecting the latter two, or anything.)

mostly, zoeya agrees to the pub visit because she is quite literally frazzled. she is sweaty and messy, her hands are shaking, and she has no idea what to do.

it’s certainly a distraction. if not a  _ great _ one.

she searches for more solutions, whatever solutions she can get. she tries to sound flippant - she has rythian there to be serious for her.

he counters all of her desperate and high-pitched suggestions with well-measured reason, but she knows that if they don’t get rid of it (if they just hide it away and pretend it doesn’t exist) it will come back and bite them in the butt.

(neither of them are happy, but she pretends to smile wide, and rythian pretends to believe her. they have no other option.)

at least if she messes up, it’s only going to hurt  _ her. _

 

_ “Because I’m definitely going to cut the right wire, I just don’t want any distractions, so we should get all our friends out of here.” _

 

zoeya is being torn apart

it’s a whirling vortex of fire tearing at her skin and at her arms and at her eyes and she is screaming and screaming and screaming

it’s a thousand times worse than the nukes of the old world

she’s unconscious, half-dead, long before the explosion peters out and she’s catapulted into the lake where she fell before

it’s all nothingness until she wakes up in a desert town, every part of her aching bone-deep.

 

_ “Oooh, aah, crikey! Rythian! Fishton, Rythian’s not here! Rythian, I miss you! Rythian, I need you right now, nuke’s about to explode! Rythian, I--!” _  
  


_ … _

_ “Please, please,  _ **_please_ ** _ be careful. You know how I feel about you.” _

_ … _

 

the magic is different, rythian tells her, as he feeds her potions.

we’re a long way from home, rythian tells her, but she’s half asleep, floating in and out of feverish nightmares.

do you need any help, rythian asks her, as she’s engrossed in building her new arm. she almost denies out of instinct, but then she looks at his face. she nods to the wire she needs him to hold in place as she screws a piece of shining metal on.

he’s there beside her, warm and solid, as she attaches the arm once and for all, and he laughs with her as she tests the movement and realises that it works perfectly.

she’s in hospital for a long while longer. zoeya knows she would probably go stir-crazy, but for rythian bringing her little things to mess with. clothes to sew, machines to build, or the shattered shards of her visor to turn into something new.

(he resists the suggestion of using them as an implant to restore vision in her scarred eye. he’s right. that’s  _ probably _ a bit much.)

her voice is edged with teasing as she’s released from the hospital, but rythian stops and starts with his dry annoyance, voice biting. and now she listens. and apologises.

even though he tells her it’s alright, she can still see the sparkle of warmth in his eyes.

she’s making progress. in more ways than one.

 

_ “I  _ **_do_ ** _ know what you did for me, I know that.” _

 

every gun-shot fired makes her nervous - sets her vocal chords thrumming with the urge to scream again as she screws her eyes shut to block out the echoes of the past.

bang, bang, bang, and zoeya knows that really teep is helping, but, at the same time…

it hurts.

then rythian distracts her with thaumcraft, and, even though the gunshots still linger in the back of her mind, it helps. she smiles.

(especially when he calls her a mushroom princess. that’s just super cool.)

 

_ “Sort of a mini-nuclear explosion going off over there, that’s-- that’s fine!” _

 

the time machine is a fun project, zoeya has to admit.

complicated, and very, very volatile, but fun. it’s the kind of inventor’s urge she hasn’t got since the old world, and it’s amazing.

less amazing is how it all goes wrong - not once, but twice.

less amazing is the massive crater where her home once stood, destroyed thanks to her foolishness.

even less amazing is the way rythian doesn’t believe her about panda. (admittedly, panda had seemed to think she was crazy too, but she’d known panda for all of a few hours, so it stung a little less with him.)

 

_ “Wow, you’re Panda. You’re a panda named Panda. Your parents must not have liked you!” _

 

they find the portal, and the mushrooms give zoeya a headache, but she pushes past them with a genuine grin at rythian’s sort-of-belief.

the door is attuned to her, and she’s honestly really quite confused - if flattered by rythian’s compliment. the sceptre is warm in her hand, almost familiar feeling, and under her enthusiasm, she’s a little bit freaked out by it all.

not that it stops her from wanting to go into the portal, of course. it looks interesting, and it’s surrounded by mushrooms! what could go wrong?

and of course, nowadays, where one of them goes, the other one follows.

 

_ “Can I say, like, Geronimo, and fall in in style?” _

 

and later.

later they fall asleep under the eternal dusk of the twilight forest, teep leaning against a towering tree and snoring in a way that only a dinosaur knows how.

their hands twine together, illuminated by the campfire.

they’re home.

**Author's Note:**

> this has been a long time coming for me, and was supremely gratifying to write at last. if i contribute nothing else to the yogfandom (which isn't my intention), then this would be a good final work.
> 
> as always, you can find me at screechfoxes on tumblr.


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